You are so going to want to order yourself a copy of The Silver Linings Playbook: A Novel
Matthew and I have never met in person, but for a few years now have been friends via email. You couldn’t find a more charming and kind-hearted fellow, who is hard working and honest and extremely talented. I couldn’t be happier for his success (which just keeps coming and coming).
Keep your eye on this guy as he is a star in the making (though in my book, he’s already a star).
What a treat! Here is an excellent flash by the darling and dear Katrina Denza at wigleaf—soap–and a wonderful (generous) interview with her at Storyglossia.
If I press a book into your hand and beg you to read it, you will know that I am doing so because I love the book and I want to share that love with you. When you examine the beloved book, you will note how many pages I’ve dog eared. The more dog ears, the deeper my love.
Paul Lisicky’s gorgeous, tender book of essays, Famous Builder
If you start off your book, very first thing, having to spell your name in a classroom–you’ve got me. Right there. Welcome to every first day of my life.
But then if you carry on with wonderful, evocative, empathetic renderings of your family and childhood neighbors and relatives (Mrs. Fox! I picture her as Anne Bancroft playing Mrs. Robinson) and your own place within this world and your own childhood longings (to become a famous builder of all the wondrous and geeky things), you’ve got me even further.
Lisicky pages through his life and opens old wounds and examines them, but never once paints himself or his family the victim. His parents are human beings and he is a son who tries hard and sometimes fails and sometimes lets go. He is a son who yearns, just as they want him to yearn.
While this is partly a book of coming of age, mostly this is a book of home, and what Lisicky (and his brothers) knows is that home is moving away from you just as you know it is there–home could be a department store on its way out or waterfront homes built on dredge and fill or a hotel room.
Home is in the moment:
“I turn back toward the room. If it were mine to do such a thing, I’d secure this moment with the heaviest anchor: Arden taking up all the space he needs; Beau resting a thick paw on Mark’s forearm; Mark touching my leg as I walk by, just to let me know he’s thinking of me.”
A beautiful, touching book. Read it.
+ fiction, flash fiction, literary, literary journal, Myfanwy Collins, short stories, short story, writers
My work in the new issues of: Mississippi Review and Quick Fiction
I’m thrilled and delighted to announce that I have stories in the latest issues of the Mississippi Review (the movie issue) and Quick Fiction.
Paula Nangle’s debut novel, The Leper Compound
The book starts out with Colleen as a motherless child ill with Malaria and ends with the death of her father and with her mentally ill sister (schizophrenia since childhood) finally finding a mother in their father’s new wife. Throughout, Colleen struggles with her sense of identity and her desire to make sense of life and death–she is a lover, a nurse, a mother–and through it all, an outsider.
All of this could take place anywhere at any time, but it does not: it takes place in the waning years of Rhodesia. A fascinating back drop lending the book political and social overtones and adding to its richness (especially poignant with Zimbabwe so present in the news these days).
I cannot quote from the book as the copy I have is an ARC, but I can tell you this: Nangle can write. In fact, she writes beautifully–her words are moving and yet never overdone. It would have been easy for her to be melodramatic with her subject matter. Instead, she opts for clean, precise language.
I hope to read more from her and I hope that you will look for this book and read it and allow it to move you in the way it has moved me.
Any of you city slickers who imagine small-town life is dull ought to read Laura Benedict’s suspenseful, sexy, and haunting debut novel, Isabella Moon
And just who is Isabella Moon? Well, she’s the missing girl who comes back to haunt the novel’s protagonist, Kate, and reveal her secret. But like pulling a thread–one secret revealed leads to another, until all of the town’s ugly skeletons are revealed and we learn once and for all that secrets are dangerous and that buried secrets don’t stay that way for long.
I was drawn to this book when I saw the spooky book trailer last year and I have to say it did not disappoint and many a night after I’d put the book down and shut out the light, I kept the covers pulled up tight under my chin.
If you like books that keep you guessing, that keep you on the edge of your seat, and that present you with believable, sympathetic characters, then this book is for you. Read it.
+ books, fiction, flash fiction, Kim Chinquee, literary, short stories, short story, small press, storytelling, writers
Oh Baby, by Kim Chinquee
Be prepared: Oh Baby, Kim Chinquee’s debut collection, will knock you on your ass.
It’s a book about love: mother for child; child for mother, for father; man for woman; woman for man and man and man. Love for running. Love for vodka.
It’s a book about women: a runner, an artist, a nurse, a mother, a girlfriend, a wife, a daughter, a friend. A drawer of blood.
A woman who lives in England, in the midwest, in some nameless place.
A woman.
But mostly, it’s a book about identity in which the author constantly scrutinizes these women to find out which one is the one. In “Purple” she asks: “Me, who was I?” and then never answers the question. And then in “Wig” she talks of buying a wig and says: “When I got back to the hotel, I put it on and thought I looked like Kim Chinquee.”
And this is what we’re all looking for: that time and place where we most feel like ourselves. When we are no longer pretending and donning our wigs. Do we ever find it?
Taken seperately, these stories will hurt you; taken together as one in this collection, they will clobber you and rob you of your breath.
Read it.
The wonderful and extremely talented Katrina Denza acted as guest editor Storyglossia’s Issue #27 and I am thrilled that she selected one of my stories for inclusion: Timmy is Dead.
In other news, I’m delighted to announce that Keyhole Magazine Issue #2 (within which you will find my story “Voodoo”) is available for order.
I’m deeply honored by the company I keep in both of these publications and thank the editors for choosing my work.
Wigleaf, an excellent new site for short fiction, has just posted an intriguing interview with Quick Fiction‘s Jennifer Pieroni. This interview is sure to please with such funny, honest, and human moments as this one:
We were at a bookfair once and this woman rounded the corner and started fluttering her arms and making these excited noises. I thought maybe she was about to tell me that we’d published her work or something. Instead she said “Quick Fiction! I have issue nine in my bathroom!” It was a really odd realization for me—that Quick Fiction nine was in that woman’s bathroom and probably others’ too.
The women and girls found within the stories of Rachel Sherman’s short story collection, The First Hurt
My grandmother has only seen me from my neck up. She has never even caught a peek of my terrain of secret skin. On my chest, my back, my arms, I have things growing at the base of me that only I can feel the first hurt of.
And to touch herself in these places, to pick at herself and bring on the hurt is to show herself love. She says:
It’s like magic: you touch your skin with the things you were given–hands and oil and pores. All you are doing is wiping yourself with love.
Shame and pain are equal to love–this is terrain I am quite familiar with, as, I would guess, are many of us.
All in all, it’s a great collection and I recommend it wholeheartedly.
I’m pleased to announce that I am a published memoirist! That’s right my very own six word memoir is included in the excellent new book: Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure
Want to learn more? Here’s the official video:
There are some exciting books coming out soon and I’m sure you’ll want a copy of each:
I’m beyond delighted that I will soon have in my possession a copy of A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness! This collection of four chapbooks ( Laughter, Applause, Laughter, Music, Applause by Kathy Fish, Wanting by Amy L. Clark, Sixteen Miles Outside of Phoenix by Elizabeth Ellen, and The Sky Is a Well by Claudia Smith) is sure to please. Here’s what the brilliant Pia Z. Ehrhardt has to say about it:
The four brilliant chapbooks that make up A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness are disarmingly, unabashedly intimate collections by women who know how to tell a story and aren’t afraid to drag the unspoken out into the light of day.
Kim Chinquee is not only a wonderful, supportive person, she’s also a talented writer and I’m excited that I will soon own a copy of her forthcoming collection: Oh Baby. To tantalize you further, here’s the blurb:
A wonderful debut collection of prose poems and flash fictions, short short stories of beautiful precisions and understated passions. While the bricks with which Chinquee constructs her fictions—failed or failing relationships, childhood friendships, the intricacies of family life—are not uncommon, the architecture she creates with them is rare indeed: stories now full of light, now somber, now opening the reader’s eyes to an utterly new space.
I’m a huge fan of Xujun Eberlin–not just of her writing, but of her person. She is an incredible human being who writes more beautifully and clearly in English than many native speakers. That being said, you will want a copy of her soon-to-be-released book APOLOGIES FORTHCOMING
A totally illuminating collection of stories centered around China’s Cultural Revolution and its aftermath, which, as we learn, continues even today-with both sides still holding out, with “apologies forthcoming.” Xujun Eberlein lived in China during that tumultuous period and now makes her home in America. This, her first story collection, is both disturbing and enthralling.
These books not only represent the fine work of some talented women writers, but also they exhibit the quality work put out by small presses. Go on and support ’em, why don’t you?
myfanwy collins 